Shooting for Realism: How Accurate are Video-Game Weapons?

With a spate of new military shooter titles hitting the market, PM's resident geek gets the inside story on gaming's next-gen guns from top developers, who have to balance coolness with correctness for every M-16 they recreate.

The main gun developer for the new Rainbow Six Vegas 2 says Ubisoft's team "could make it as anally realistic as possible" but that gameplay concerns are paramount.

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In real life, people rarely want to get into a firefight. But in many video games, particularly military-themed first-person shooters (FPS) like the just-released Rainbow Six Vegas 2, you can't wait to step into the line of fire. After all, you're an elite commando, and there's no way not to fight--no button to press to call your nervous wreck of a wife or go hang out with the kids. It doesn't matter how many bullets you take while gunning down whole platoons of terrorists and mercenaries, because this is red-blooded escapism at its geekiest. So shut up and starting shooting guys.

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But unlike sci-fi FPS games such as Halo or Doom, military shooters have a tradition of so-called realism. Most of the in-game weapons are available now--or at least loosely based on designs that could eventually reach the likes of Iraq and Afghanistan. In other words, as optimistic as game developers might be about a high-tech replacement for the M-16 assault rifle, there are no plasma rifles or rail guns in your arsenal. Firefights look and sound like something out of Blackhawk Down, with that unnerving, staccato crackle of modern-day warfare. And the damage inflicted feels more accurate, too: In games like Call of Duty 4 or Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter, most enemies are vulnerable to a single burst, and a few incoming rounds can kill you easily. So as this successful genre continues to deliver best-selling titles, will increasingly powerful PCs and game consoles allow military shooters to become more realistic than ever?

If Rainbow Six Vegas 2 is any indication, the answer is a big, fat "sort of." The hugely anticipated sequel, which came out last week, has a relatively standard techno-thriller story line. It's a gung-ho fantasy of special-ops heroism, complete with weapons of mass destruction and a seemingly endless supply of well-equipped bad guys. Like the plot, the gameplay for RSV2 picks up where its predecessor left off, as players navigate an array of ambushes and hostage situations in Las Vegas and Mexico. Cover is still crucial to most engagements, and squad-level tactics (i.e., when to use smoke grenades) will usually prevail over run-and-gun action-hero stunts. Aside from a new "sprint" button, little has changed in couch-potato combat here. But when it comes to the guns, the developers seem to have pushed the Tom Clancy series closer to the battlefield.

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Or does it just seem that way? In this installment, bullets can penetrate a variety of materials. This isn't an industry first--in Call of Duty 4, for example, bullets can veer off into different trajectories. But according to Philippe Theiren, an RSV2 designer at Ubisoft Montreal and the team's self-described "gun guy," bullet penetration now takes into account incredibly fine details, like whether the target is wearing leather or cloth. "It's actually an excessively complex formula," Theiren says. "If someone shoots through a plant, then a car door, then it hits Level 3 body armor, all of that effects the force of the round." Actual ballistic data associated with the guns in RSV2, then, determine whether you can fire a burst through a wooden table and take someone out.

Except, of course, when the developers feel the need to cheat. All of the guns in RSV2 start out extremely accurate, based on factory stats and more, before game balance and player expectations come into play. A shotgun firing buckshot, for example, has significantly more penetration in RSV2 than it should. Why? "People associate shotguns with powerful, close-range weapons," Theiren says. So a shotgun blast will punch through walls and armor just fine, even though buckshot is known for its lack of penetration in the real world.

"I take these weapons, and look at what defines them, or what people think defines them," Theiren explains. "For an Uzi, people think it fires lots of bullets, and it's really inaccurate." That, he knows, has nothing to do with reality--if anything, Uzis are considered some of the most reliable and accurate submachine guns around. But the 80s (and Miami Vice in particular) offered us the Uzi as a low-life villain's weapon, spit-fire and out-of-control. "So I make it fire faster than it should. It's about taking the personality of a weapon, and making it shine in the game," Theiren says.

With 200 unique variables for each weapon, including the damage it inflicts at various ranges, how fast it reloads and when bullets tend to start dropping off, a gun in RSV2 could perform precisely like the real thing. "These consoles are so powerful, when you fire a bullet we could factor all of it in: windfall, range, everything about the history of that specific weapon, friction values for the barrel, how many times it's been fired since it was last cleaned," says Theiren. "We could make it as anally realistic as possible. But we're not trying to make a live simulator."

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Full-on simulation, to some extent, is the job of America's Army (AA). The incredibly popular PC game (and not so successful console port) is officially sanctioned by the United States Army, and the PC editions are available for download at no cost. In this unapologetic recruiting tool, you spend time qualifying with individual weapons on the firing range, take part in nonlethal war games, and get chewed out for so much as wandering a few yards away from your unit. Adhering to realism is something of a sticking point for AA, since the last thing the Army wants to do is to present modern warfare as a series of high-octane action-movie scenes.

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With consistent access to actual weapon systems and insight from current and former soldiers, you would think that AA's guns would come out 100 percent accurate. "We can actually implement many more characteristics than the game-play Frames Per Second can handle," notes AA executive producer Phil Bossant. "This means we need to either pick and choose carefully which particular characteristics are meaningful to the game play and environment--or come up with an average estimated compensation."

In other words, these are two completely different versions of the same story. In Rainbow Six Vegas 2, the reason for scaling back on realism isn't the hardware, but the drive to make guns feel like the ones we've seen in movies. And in America's Army, the limitation is hardware, since accuracy is a key goal for the development team. Whatever role the hardware is playing, it's safe to say that the standard for realism in military shooters is hewing closer to the Rainbow Six school of play than that of America's Army.

When you're hit in nearly any war-themed FPS, whether its Call of Duty 4 or Ghost Recon, surviving means finding cover, then jumping back into the fight. This regenerative health system has no bearing on the story line or on reality. In America's Army, injuries don't evaporate into the ether, but subsequent hits are more likely to kill you. It could be more punishing and grisly, but recruiting tools shouldn't necessarily be complete buzzkills. While Bossant says that AA 3.0, which should be out this year, will include even more detailed mechanics for medical treatment, the rest of the military shooters aren't likely to follow suit. "The majority of the community wants to get back in the action," says Infinity Ward's Robert Bowling, the community manager for Call of Duty 4. "We still favor gameplay and fun value over making it 100 percent realistic."

The dev team for Call of Duty 4 also starts out with hyper-realistic weapons, then tweaks them for balance and personality. The AK-47 might start out with significantly more recoil than the M-16, which is then gradually dialed down to more manageable levels. Realism, in other words, is almost always about the flavor of the game, and it's as subjective as any element of genre. Bowling claims that all of the gunshots in Call of Duty 4 are based on unique audio recordings, while Theiren insists there wasn't enough room on a DVD to avoid repeating some sound effects in Rainbow Six. So why do the rifles sound so much more blistering in the RSV2 audio mix? "There's more echo," he says. "When you're firing outside, there's a much nicer sound."

By ramping up that rolling, reverberating roar that some of the larger-caliber guns produce in outdoor environments, the weapons in this game feel more realistic than their counterparts in Call of Duty 4. As for how much damage that same assault rifle dishes out in both games, or whether you can turn a corner and fire it more accurately than a larger weapon, the realism quotient is the same. If it feels like the real thing, game on. If not, there's a free game that might be a little slower-paced, but a little closer to reality. And if none of this is real enough, you can even visit a virtual recruiting station in America's Army to find out how to sign up for the real real thing. A word of warning: Regenerative health is definitely not part of that equation.

Even America's Army, the military's self-described recruitment tool, must balance hardware concerns with not making gameplay too much like an action movie.